


Singing Stars and (Cyber)Space

by Bright_Days (Mirradin)



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen, Internet micronation being strange, Ladonia existing on the Internet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-14
Updated: 2014-04-14
Packaged: 2018-01-19 10:00:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1465228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mirradin/pseuds/Bright_Days
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>High above the earth, riding radio pulses, Ladonia dances in geostationary orbit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Singing Stars and (Cyber)Space

High above the earth, riding radio pulses, Ladonia dances in geostationary orbit.

Stimulus- _response_ : Turn him off and make him powerless.

Or: Stimulus- _response_ , switch off the power and he sheds his heavy body, becomes light and fast and all-encompassing. Turn him off, and the stars sing.

**

While others walk the world in heavy, confining bodies, Ladonia makes his way up to the world’s satellite necklace. He surfs a radio signal into the sky, up and up until it’s caught by a metal star turning ponderously on solar-panel wings, flashes through its mechanical mind and leaps from one to another.

They sing to each other in beeps and whirrs, and he sings back. Some of them have wavering analogue voices; the others rap to the earth in digital binary, loud and fast with the drumbeat of his heart. Out beyond the atmosphere, no wind to carry sound, Ladonia listens to the electronic symphony, radio-tunes and military jargon, the close-bound radio song, tight-coded laser shouts, and out beyond it all, the senseless crackle of gamma-ray fires.

They turn ponderously above the Earth, hovering on solar-panel wings; Icarus’ wings may have melted in the sun, but the singing stars only fly more surely.

**

He may love space, but Ladonia was born to the ocean floor.

He glimpses Sealand sometimes as he flashes past on deep-sea cables, riding photon signals down fibre-optic pathways. He leaps from New York to Dublin in the blink of an eye, races down the coast of Africa in rubber-and-iron cladding before he bounces through a wi-fi zone in the Ivory Coast and springs back up into space. He avoids China; crashing into the Firewall _hurts_.

He was born to the seabed, but he doesn’t like it there. The hidden monsters and metal anchors that Sealand laughs at from his concrete footing can make Ladonia’s whispering ribbons of light fray apart into silent darkness. Cut the cables and he can’t reach Australia; slice through another and his path to South America is gone. It’s happened before and will happen again.

Ladonia prefers space.

**

Alfred was up here once. Ladonia finds evidence of his passing all the time. He dodges Cold War space junk on his way up to the satellite band, burnt-out components and abandoned solar panels, the detritus of the Space Race. Sometimes he spots the drifting remains of the space-interred, but not often. Mother Earth called most of them home decades ago.

The computer in the moon lander is still alive, but it’s senile. He’s tried singing to it but it only croaks back, its copper-component mind too rotted out by time and moon-dust to spin him into existence. The Moon is one place he can never touch.

It’s frustrating, when he can hop to Mars in a matter of seconds, leapfrog down to the surface and taste the Red Planet’s dust through Curiosity’s chemical analysers. He’s walked long-dry floodplains with slow metal feet, even spun himself into a faded projection to touch undiscovered rock faces with unreal fingertips. Out beyond Earth’s orbit, Ladonia walks alone where nobody breathing has ever walked, and likely never will.

Alfred was up here once, but not any more. Ivan was up here once, but not any more. So Ladonia flits through the world’s singing satellite necklace, the red-headed ghost of an unreal boy, visible only from the windows of the shuttles that no longer fly.


End file.
